Recipe: Moist Chocolate Cake

Also known as ‘The Most Awesomest Chocolate Cake Ever’. It’s another one of those recipes that I’ve had for so long I can’t remember where I got it from. It lives on the first page in my (very battered) recipe book, a sign of very old age – the recipe book too, you should see the state of the poor thing! I’m translating it from french for you, hence the measurements in grams rather than in cups. I have no idea what the equivalents are in cups so you’ll need to use kitchen scales. But I can promise you that this cake is worth that little bit of extra trouble. Trust me.

Moist Chocolate Cake

Ingredients

250g dark cooking chocolate

130g butter

5 eggs

100g sugar

2 tablespoons flour

pinch of salt

Preheat your oven at 180 degrees C (th. 6).

Melt the butter and the chocolate together and leave aside to cool a little.

Break the eggs, separating the whites from the yolks. Place both in separate bowls. Leave the whites aside for the moment, you’ll need them later. Take the yolks, add the sugar and whisk until the mixture whitens (it should end up a pale yellow colour, 2 or 3 minutes whisking should be enough).

Add the melted chocolate and butter, mix, then add the 2 tablespoons of flour. Mix well.

Whisk the egg whites with a pinch of salt until they form soft peaks. Add 1/3 to the cake mixture and mix it through gently, folding it in the mixture. Add another 1/3 of the egg whites and repeat, then again with the rest of the egg whites.

Place the cake mixture in a greased or lined cake dish. Bake for around 35 minutes, or until a skewer inserted through it comes out clean. Place on a cooling rack.

Before serving, sift some cocoa and/or icing sugar on top of the cake (optional). This cake doesn’t take too well to icing so I wouldn’t recommend it. It doesn’t need it either, it’s so good on its own, hehe.

I didn’t get around to taking a proper picture of the cake before Mr A took it to work so I’m sorry to say that this is the best picture of it that I’ve got, fresh out of the oven and still in the tin.

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Now that I’ve given you the cake’s recipe, I need to tell you a funny little story about the making of this particular cake. Miss P has really been into helping me out with everything these days, doing the laundry, tidying up, putting things back where they belong, etc… But her favourite thing of all is baking – she didn’t get that from her mum at all, erm, erm. She often opens the kitchen drawers, grabs a metal bowl, wooden spoon, tea towel, asks to wear one of my aprons, brings it all to the coffee table and start mixing imaginary cakes. It’s soooooooooo cute, it just melts my heart every time.

So yesterday when I started making the cake, she quite obviously wanted to give me a hand. I popped her on a chair next to me and let her help me do the mixing. But because I was paying attention to her, making sure she wasn’t going to fall off her chair, I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing and ended up mixing whole eggs with the sugar, instead of just the yolks and had to start again. So I put the whole eggs and sugar mixture in a saucepan, grabbed a wooden spoon and let Miss P have fun with that whilst I was remaking the cake the proper way.

When she saw me adding flour to my cake she asked me for some. I put a sprinkle of flour into her saucepan and she started mixing it away, repeatedly asking me ‘more-more’ flour and I was happy to oblige. She had the BEST fun. It went everywhere but it was a lot of fun. It was so adorable to see her putting all her heart into mixing her cake. She’d been at it for a good 15 minutes when Mr A arrived home from work and shot this little video. I couldn’t resist to show it to you.

When she was done with it, I couldn’t bear to throw her mixture away. The idea of wasting 5 eggs, 100g sugar and a bit of flour was beyond me so I decided to try to save it. I smoothed out the lumps Miss P had made whilst mixing flour into it, added some self-raising flour, cocoa powder and shredded coconut until it had a cakey look to it. Put it in a cake tin and popped it in the oven. And guess what? It turned out pretty good. I ended up adding a bit too much flour so it’s a touch too dry, but that’s nothing a bit of ice-cream of whipped cream can’t fix.

I decided to call this cake ‘Miss P’s Chocolate Delight’. I might even end up making a proper recipe for it one day, who knows? :)